Vitamin and mineral supplements for human and veterinary use are commonplace. Recently, it has become recognized that certain groups of the human population may require quite high intakes of minerals, such as calcium, to prevent or alleviate certain disease states, for example, osteoporotic conditions. The medical management of certain anemias can be handled rather well by increasing the daily intake of iron. Some diets, or heavy physical exercise, may require the intake of considerable quantities of minerals apart from those generally obtained through what otherwise would be considered a balanced diet.
Mineral supplements, such as those commercially available, are useful in many circumstances where enhanced mineral uptake is desirable. However, adhering to a regimen which requires the separate intake of mineral supplements can give sub-optimal results, simply because the regimen requires a change in the normal habits and practices of the user. It would be more convenient if the minerals could be included in ordinary foods and beverages, so that they would be ingested without extra attention, planning and implementation on the part of the user.
There are well-recognized problems associated with adding mineral supplements to foods and beverages. For example, many calcium supplements tend to be rather insoluble, and, therefore, not very useful in beverages, or tend to have a "chalky" taste or mouth feel. Iron supplements tend to discolor foodstuffs, or to be organoleptically unsuitable. Moreover, it is particularly difficult to formulate foods and, especially, beverages, containing mixtures of calcium supplements and iron supplements, inasmuch as these minerals tend to interact. This interaction not only affects the organoleptic and aesthetic properties of the foods and beverages, but also undesirably affects the nutritional bioavailability of these minerals, themselves.
It would be desirable, therefore, to have mixed calcium and iron supplements which are compatible and nutritionally available. It would also be quite useful to have such supplements which could be added to food and beverage compositions without undesirably affecting organoleptic or aesthetic properties.
It is an object of the present invention to provide calcium-iron mineral supplements which fulfill these unmet needs.
It is a further object of this invention to provide foodstuffs, beverages and beverage concentrates which are supplemented with calcium and iron.
These and other objects are secured herein, as will be seen from the following disclosure.